Hiren’s Boot CD: What it is and Why You Need it so Much

If you’ve never heard of a thing called Hiren’s Boot CD, then you’re in the right place. I am going to tell you what it does and why you have to download it this very second. Let’s go!

First, let me explain what the Boot CD is, essentially. It is an all-in-one rescue disc solution which is crucial if your PC tends to break down a lot. Hiren’s has numerous Windows repair tools installed so that you can boot into your computer as easy as possible.

If you ever have issues like your hard drive failing, your computer catching nasty viruses, you forgetting your password and not knowing how to recover it, or accidentally losing all the data, then Hiren’s Boot CD will be a godsend for you. There are a number of useful tools installed that are divided into different categories depending on your computer’s problem.

Interested? Here’s how to use it

How to create Hiren’s Boot CD

You don’t—and can’t—“install” Hiren’s Boot CD. It functions as a bootable utility. You must first download the image and burn it to a blank CD or DVD. But, don’t worry – the process is not that hard, and I am here to guide you every step of the way.

You can download theHiren’s Boot CD ZIP file from here https://yepdownload.com/hirens-bootcd. Hit the green “DOWNLOAD NOW” button to start the download. The image is a large 592 MB file, so it might take some time depending on your network speed—be patient! As soon as the ZIP file download is complete, extract its contents.

There are a few ways to burn the Hiren’s tool to a CD. For starters, you can just burn it to a CD.

If you want to do that, then you should insert a blank recordable CD into your computer. Windows has built-in utilities that allow you to burn files to a disc, or you can use third-party software made specifically for burning data onto a CD or DVD. You can also use the basic burner that is included in the ZIP folder if you don’t want to be fussed with multiple downloads.

Once you have your software ready, open the program and follow the steps for the tool you’re using to create a bootable disc. To create the disc using the software in the ZIP folder, open the BurnCDCC.exe file. Once open, hit on the ‘Browse’ button, which is situated near the ‘FileImage’ box. Browse to the ISO file, which is in the Hiren’s Boot folder. Please make sure that your computer recognizes your CD or DVD. Leave the speed at ‘Optimal’—you don’t need anything extreme at this stage.

Click ‘Start’ and wait for the burner to do its job. Once it’s finished, you will have a copy of Hiren’s Boot CD that is all set and ready to be used.

Another way to burn the file is to use a USB drive. This is a good option if you don’t have a recordable CD or DVD handy, or if your computer simply doesn’t have any sort of CD or DVD capability.

If you use a USB drive, all the data currently on it will be erased, so please don’t forget to make sure that everything is transferred somewhere nice and safe. Backing up never hurts, right?

As with the CD burner process, you may need to download a third-party utility that allows you to transfer an ISO image to USB and make the USB drive bootable. You can find free apps online—just do a Google search.

Once you have a USB burning tool, follow these steps:

Step 1. Insert your USB (make sure it has enough space for the Hiren’s Boot to live in) into your PC and open your app.

Step 2. Select the Hiren’s name from the drop-down box that should appear on your screen.Please don’t forget to make sure you’re choosing the one that you need because you might accidentally delete something else.

Step 3. Choose the default option of MBR partition scheme for BIOS (or a UEFI). Those should work fine. In the file system, select FAT32. Make sure you have checked the ‘Quick Format’ box, as well as ‘Create a bootable disk using’. Choose the ISO image option.

Step 4. Look for the tiny CD icon that should be situated right next to that box. That will browse to the location of the ISO file in the folder your Boot is placed in. Name it however you would like and then click ‘Start’.

As you complete all of that, you should see ‘DONE’ appear on the bottom-left side of the page. Hit ‘Close’ and that’s it! You have successfully installed Hiren’s Boot CD onto your USB drive.

How to boot up your system with Hiren’s Boot CD

Once you have your Hiren’s Boot CD on an actual CD or a flash drive, you have to boot it. Here’s how:

There’s a very good chance your computer is set to boot first from the primary hard drive by default. You need to configure your computer so that it will look for a bootable disc or USB first—before booting up from the primary drive.

When you turn on your computer, you should see some sort of prompt that allows you to access the system settings. It varies from one computer to the next, but it’s generally the DEL key or F12 or something along those lines. The message may disappear quickly, so you have to pay attention when you turn the computer on and act fast before it moves on and starts booting up your operating system.

Once you discover the right button to access the system configuration, you should tap it the second your computer turns on. Look for an option for Boot Menu or Boot Order and select it. You should see a list of the available devices—in the order your computer will look for them when booting up. Make sure that CD and/or USB are listed before your primary drive. You can leave it configured like this even when you’re not using Hiren’s Boot CD. It might delay the boot process slightly, but your PC will just check the CD drive, then check your USB port, and if it doesn’t find bootable media it will move on to the primary drive and boot like normal.

Once you have your system configured, you should be able to reboot your system with your CD / DVD or USB drive in place and the Hiren’s main screen will pop up.

What is Hiren’s Boot CD capable of doing?

Congrats! You’ve booted the Hiren’s software! Now that you are done with that, let’s take a closer look at all the fascinating features HBCD has to offer.

It can boot into an operating system

If you boot from your hard drive, your computer will simply be booted as normal. There is a thing called a Mini Windows XP, which is able to launch a very light copy of Windows XP that can be used to browse through files on a host machine, for example.

Open the Hiren’s Boot CD app on your PC and you will then see all the different tools you can use. There you can see some of the command line versions of apps like CCleaner and loads more.

WindowsXP is very old and no longer officially supported by Microsoft. However, it works just fine for this purpose and allows you to easily manage the file recovery process.

The wonderful recovery utilities

But that’s not all—there are still a lot more tools available on the main menu of Hiren’s Boot. The ones you see in the buckets are obviously not all that the Hiren’s developers offer you.

You can try out tools like the Windows Memory Diagnostic utility, for example. There is also a way for you to restore a password you might have forgotten. For that, you should use the Offline Password Changer.

There are also things like PLoP Boot Manager and Smart Boot Manager that allow you to pick a device you want to boot from in case your computer is not performing properly. You can click “NTLDR is Missing” and that should solve your booting issue.

What to do with the Custom Menu

Hiren’s Boot CD has a Custom Menu option that allows you to add files and utilities that are your personal favorites. Hiren’s Boot CD includes a variety of different tools, including some rescue CDs from popular antivirus software, but it’s nice to be able to expand the toolkit with your own utilities as well.

You can use Clonezilla if you want to clone some disks, and there are also partition tools, and a few Linux distributions. You can find a complete list of all of the tools available on the Hiren’s Boot CD at the official Hiren’s website. If something isn’t included in the Hiren’s Boot CD, odds are good you don’t really need it.

Just click around and explore the various tools and options. The ones I’ve already covered are the most important ones that you’re most likely to need, but it wouldn’t hurt for you to poke around and look at the others.

Create Hiren’s Boot CD now and thank me later

If you still doubt whether you need Hiren’s Boot CD or not, then I’d like to step in and say that I highly recommend that you do. Put it this way—when you need it most, it will probably be too late for you to create it easily. If your computer is jacked, you want to have Hiren’s Boot CD ready to go. If you have a spare USB drive or a blank CD or DVD, you should definitely take some time to burn a copy of the app and put it somewhere safe. Trust me, if and when you actually need it you will be very happy and you will want to come back here and thank me (Feel free to do so in the comments below!).

Please feel free to share your experience with Hiren’s Boot CD with me. Have you used it before? What do you think of it? Did it help you in a way you expected it to? Which utility is your absolute favorite one? Don’t be shy and share all your thoughts and opinions—I’m always eager to hear them! You can also suggest an alternative if you have a similar tool you prefer by adding that in the comment section down below.

1 Comment

I really don’t know where you’ve been living for the last 10 years, but this post is so far out of time it’s hilarious.

Why write about this now in 2018 when Hirens Boot CD was last updated in 2012? As a result all the apps are years out of date, things like MiniXP don’t work well or at all on newer hardware because of the outdated XP drivers and it doesn’t boot at all on systems with UEFI and secureboot (which most modern systems have).

Your bottom screenshot is not officially Hiren but some other version that’s been cannabalized by a third party. Hiren only has 1 Linux OS boot image, which is Parted Magic and not Ubuntu, Puppy, Slax etc.

I don’t mean to be so critical but I really don’t understand why you choose to write about this now, it was great 6, 7, 8 , 9+ years ago, but is vastly outdated and of virtually no use on computers today.

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